August 7 I had an email from a man I don’t know but whose name was familiar. I’ll call him X. He was preparing to write an article about artist Bob Rauschenberg who died recently, and he had a few questions for me, chiefly about a book I had published in 1996 concerning a living artist. Another questionnaire I had recently, this one about artist Ray Johnson who died some years ago, was easy to answer. I knew Ray “on the scene” as is said, but hardly anything else about him personally, except for the fact that I found him sort of scary, and kept my distance. I do have a deep secondhand memory of him from the nineteen sixties that I treasure, and forgot to mention in my email reply. Ray’s close friend David Bourdon told me that when I was psychiatrically confined in 1965, Ray sent “mail art” messages to the art world circuit reading, “Save Jill.” I wish Ray or anyone had sent a message like that around to some world or other in 1996 when my living artist book was published. No living artist is safe for a book unless the book is a catalogue, and even dead ones can be off limits. I remember a great hoo-ha over a beautiful biography of Jackson Pollack published long after JP’s death. None of this may seem related to THE MATTER OF BRITAIN, but you can be sure it will. This morning while still in bed, Ingrid, who had been at the post office, handed me an envelope containing a catalogue about a current exhibition at Tate Britain of Edward Burne-Jones’s enormous last painting, 1898, titled The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. I have some stellar mornings in bed. It was sent to me from the UK by my friend Tony, longtime informant and dispatcher of many things art-related. That August 7 email from X, author of a biography of a dead poet, set off a great dingdang in my head, sending me lurching into my library for an armload of Tudor dynasty books wherein “The Matter” is electrifyingly pervasive. Meantime I tried to answer X’s questions. I knew Bob well, and was curiously unmoved by his death. That may be because he never spoke to me again after I wrote an article for Art in America liberally quoting from an interview I had conducted with him about his father. Or my 1996 book in which he figured prominently, with his father not left out. X wanted to know what I thought of Michael Kimmelman’s obituary of Bob in the Times. It seems a number of gay rags were upset about it. An old subject was rising again—like an Excalibur in a lake of Avalon. I hadn’t read the obit, so Ingrid pulled it up for me online. I saw nothing wrong with it unless it was the fact that Kimmelman left out the words “gay,” “homosexual” and “lovers.” But without them at least two of Bob’s relationships with other men were clear. What do they want? X quoted from an online publication called The Gay Recluse—a parody of the Kimmelman obituary, inserting the word “gay” in every other sentence beginning, “Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American gay artist.” In reply, I asked X to imagine every other sentence beginning, “Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American straight artist.” The word “straight” in that context would be incomprehensible, and one word or the other, gay or straight, preceding “artist” would obviously elevate “sexual orientation” over artist. As I discovered to my dismay in the early 1970s, political gay people and women were not interested in art or writing. My efforts to enjoin art and politics failed badly. I had abdicated from a privileged position as “writer” in a marvelously tolerant, mutually supportive art world, and made common cause with a throng of women who could often tell that for me my writing came first—especially when the writing was mysterious, unreadable, made fun of the revolution, or was “irrepressibly” irrelevant. There were exceptions naturally. One of them became Ingrid, a very well educated Dane, whose gay brother, as she relates it, turned her on to my writing. So when she married me in 1980, she married my writing as well. I was lucky, because by then I had no “world” at all, having lost first the artists, then the women. And since Danes tend to be not only well educated but seriously family oriented, Ingrid led the way in forging a reconstruction of my lost American family, the kind of world I had not had since I lived with my grandmother aged five to eleven, and my mother would join us on weekends. A Christmas and a half ago my daughter’s daughter Amanda by my request gave me a biography of Henry VII, England’s first Tudor King. It was 1485 when Henry took the throne after killing Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, Shakespeare’s bad Richard, who probably murdered those two little princes, his nephews, in the Tower. Now I find this remarkable phrase describing Henry as “the posthumous child of his father.” Amanda, in Australia getting her Masters in linguistics at Sydney University, went Down Under over a year ago to visit a friend and somehow got stuck there. We’re all proud of her and tell everyone about her new studies and how we miss her. So Henry, now a posthumous child, was already of great interest to me because his grandfather, the Welshman Owen Tudor, was nothing more than Clerk of the Wardrobe to Henry’s grandmother. “The Matter”—Arthur of Avalon, who last rose in the public imagination in the 1100s—was renascent right here. The grandmother, Catherine of Valois, daughter of King Charles VI of France, was obviously quite grand. Before she knew Owen, her Clerk of the Wardrobe, she was married to Henry V, who made her a widow at age twenty. Henry V of course won the famous Battle of Agincourt in 1415. After marrying Catherine, he was off again across the Channel to continue his kingly duties begun in 1337 under Edward III to take France for England forever. It was the “War” that went on for a “Hundred Years,” but actually lasted longer. Merely marrying the French King’s daughter did nothing for V, though naturally he thought it should, and he died of dysentery in Calais in 1422 during his final campaign. Catherine, now the young Dowager Queen (their infant son Henry VI succeeding V), on her own in a foreign country, found the Welshman Owen surpassingly attractive indeed, and they proceeded to have four, maybe five, children together, the eldest called Edmund, the next one Jasper. The literature on the relationship of Catherine and Owen is very dicey when it comes to their marriage. One must put quotes around marriage. Some historians avoid the subject completely. Others say they were “secretly” married. There is no proof or direct evidence of a marriage. The exact nature of the liaison has been covered up because it led directly to England’s first Tudor king, Henry VII, posthumous son of Edmund. Edmund, along with Jasper, were both bastards until their older half brother Henry VI (once the infant king) rescued them following the death of Catherine their mutual mother, legitimized them and turned them into earls of the realm. Then Edmund, by making a brilliant marriage to the 11-year old Lady Margaret Beaufort, a greatgreatgranddaughter of Edward III, gave his son Henry the chance to be king and start the Tudor line—all in lieu of a paternal lineage of total doubt. Here “The Matter” billows in a roaring wind, a heraldic standard in full battle. The Tudors were Welsh, and both VII and his son VIII embraced King Arthur of Avalon as their mythic standard bearer, a figure with a paternity even more unlikely than theirs derived from Owen. THE MATTER OF BRITAIN pertains to all things Arthurian. The Tudors ended the reign of the Plantagenets, begun in 1154 under Henry II. Royal genealogies are very convoluted and I haven’t even touched on The Wars of the Roses—the background to 1485 and Bosworth. I retain a fondness, or call it a smile, over the Plantagenets, whom I used improbably in a pseudonymous scheme